Comments on: ontologizinghttp://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/
ecoculture, geophilosophy, mediapoliticsSun, 18 Mar 2018 22:37:58 +0000hourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.3By: cotton tale hottsie dottsiehttp://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/#comment-2225108
Sun, 15 Mar 2015 20:54:01 +0000http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/#comment-2225108Merely a smiling visitor here to share the love (:, btw outstanding style and design .
]]>By: aihttp://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/#comment-1303
Mon, 10 May 2010 22:24:11 +0000http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/#comment-1303Joseph – Thanks for your enthusiastic defense of OOO. I think what you’re describing really is where Graham and Levi are trying to go, and I don’t mean to take that away from them. If anything, I hope my questioning helps them work out a few of the kinks in their ontologies.

you write:

“OOO’s object [. . .] is dynamic in its activity, it is kaleidoscopic in its dialogue with its environment and other objects, it is dizzying and hot in its seductive agency and as cold and distant as a star with its reserve of potency and energy. [. . .] [OOO] wants to treat the human subject as it treats all real entities — in all of its glorious, ecstatic potential and worldly relationships. Also, perhaps more importantly, it wants to decentralize and deconstruct this precise dichotomy you critique between the human subject and “everything else.” For OOO, there isn’t the subject and object, there is only “everything else.””

This is beautifully put, and I find the first sentence to be on a par with Harman’s and Bryant’s most captivating writing. As I’ve said before (here and on Levi’s blog), my discomfort mainly arises from the outward appearances of OOO – e.g., some of its basic terminology (like “object-oriented”, which suggests an everyday understanding of “objects” rather than the subtle and nuanced definitions they provide), its emphases (which I may be wrong about, since I haven’t read all their writing and since their work is evolving all the time in any case), and occasional offhand claims for itself and against others (i.e., relationists). Once we get into the details, I find their thinking to be very rich and productive – and exciting, as you clearly demonstrate.

]]>By: Joseph C Goodsonhttp://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/#comment-1302
Fri, 07 May 2010 12:01:37 +0000http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/#comment-1302This is a very succinct collection of questions which object-oriented ontology should answer. You give a very elegant defense of relationalism, especially in your closing paragraph. I do think, however, that object-oriented thought can do all of the things you want relationism to do, and more. First, OOO doesn’t diminish the subject for the objective, nor does it simply raise all objects to the level of subjects. “Object” is really, following Harman, a boring term. It’s a boring signifier, given the place it has been demoted to in relation to the Subject. But all of this is wrong, I think. OOO’s object isn’t boring at all — it is everything you speak of. It is dynamic in its activity, it is kaleidoscopic in its dialogue with its environment and other objects, it is dizzying and hot in its seductive agency and as cold and distant as a star with its reserve of potency and energy. OOO doesn’t diminish the human subject, either. It wants to treat the human subject as it treats all real entities — in all of its glorious, ecstatic potential and worldly relationships. Also, perhaps more importantly, it wants to decentralize and deconstruct this precise dichotomy you critique between the human subject and “everything else.” For OOO, there isn’t the subject and object, there is only “everything else.”

If there is any point to political thought or activity, surely OOO is a champion of it, because it says categorically that the concrete economic, political, social and material situation is not fossilized into unbreakable relationships, and though these situations appear quite inescapable, OOO says that it is only because there is excess, there is untapped reservoirs deep in the heart of all the entities in these situations, that we are not condemned to that status quo. It is trying to say that these relationships do not determine our existence. We have to have the courage to realize that dark reservoir of the human-object, the human-entity, and that we can act in ways these relationships don’t exhaust. But, at the same time, OOO is deeply honest about this endeavor: if we are to change the world and not simply describe it, we have to realize we are not sovereign, but in concert with a near phantasmagorical array of worlds upon worlds, of an near infinity of agents and actors which do not bow to our languages or thoughts, each an ontological reservoir of power and relation. But, OOO seems very bright to me, that it says that we can transcend the relationships that we are stuck in, be they economic, political, linguistic or otherwise, because we are not absolutely defined by them. I see OOO as offering a kind of challenging optimism when it comes to questions of agency and freedom. Challenging, because this will require great work, as Levi calls it, a real cartography of situations. It means, I think, great attention to the sciences, to sociology and economic investigation, and to not simply take the objects and their reality for granted (which, I think, correlationism seems to promote a kind of indifference to the concrete life and full-bodied independence of entities as they are). OOO is just beginning, and your questions are something that I think will require time and thought and real engagement with these entities and situations.

As I see it, OOO is not privileging the static over the process — it is trying to investigate precisely how an entity is both itself in process and more than this process. It is trying to offer an ontology worthy of the entity itself, as it both changes, is open to change, and remains an entity. If you want, OOO seems to unveil the inherent subjectivity of all objects, not in any anthropomorphic sense, but in the sense of what we have traditionally (since Kant) imagined as belonging purely to humanity — that each entity actively interprets each other entity according to its own inherent structure or power, but without losing itself in that doing. Or, that like our own subjectivity, each entity withdraws from the relations that it is in, such that it is always capable of new actualizations. I don’t see any diminishment or depletion or reduction of either human-entity or nonhuman-entity in this.

Sorry to be so long-winded, but I very much agree with the sentiment of your post and the direction of your concerns and felt that OOO can and, really, is proffering, what I think are, strong and tenacious arguments in answer to these questions. In any case, I agree completely with Harman: we need an enjoyable and engrossing realism of objects that does justice to the adventure of the objects themselves. I think this is happening over the blogosphere and in the margins of academia, already.

]]>By: kvondhttp://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/#comment-1301
Thu, 06 May 2010 22:23:46 +0000http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/#comment-1301I’ve always felt that the ever-retreating object is nothing more than a projection of the ideological doctrine of the human soul, and that this untouchable “objecthood” is a stand-in for an essential isolation from relations. That this “objecthood” is then projected onto all things in the world makes it one of the most anthropomorphic, anthropocentric metaphysical models possible, making “object-oriention” something of a misnomer.
]]>By: aihttp://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/#comment-1300
Wed, 05 May 2010 15:07:46 +0000http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/#comment-1300Paul – Thanks for the Trocco link. Your point that “‘objects’ used to be ‘subjects'” is compatible with Whitehead’s understanding (though it’s more complicated than that). And I agree with you that “we can have objects which are not reducible to their relations, but are dependent on things other than themselves”. In a process-relational view, since relations are always in process, it would be meaningless to try to “reduce” something to its relations…

Re: space as derivative, I didn’t intend to imply that. As for ‘pace,’ my understanding of that Latin word is that it doubles for “with all due respect to.”

I was struck by the observation that ‘space’ is derivative, not primary, and being created all the time…

Funny, I once thought pace meant ‘following’ rather than its opposite, ‘against’.

]]>By: Paul Bainshttp://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/#comment-1298
Wed, 05 May 2010 03:02:17 +0000http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/04/ontologizing/#comment-1298There is also no reason why we shouldn’t have postmortal existence…would we then be an ‘object’ in your terms (i.e. objects as physical things)..?

As I mention in PoS ‘objects’ used to be ‘subjects’ – ‘objects’ arose as that of which we are aware ‘objected to thought.’ – now there’s correlationism!

But surely we can have objects which are not reducible to their relations, but are dependent on things other than themselves. Or cannot be understood apart from them (the eye and light).

A related topic would be whether we think ‘we’ or ‘I’ am brought into existence by my parents – the question of emergence..does the psyche emerge from the body. Crocco has an article on this ‘On Minds’ Location’. In this tradition one cannot locate a mind, only it’s site of interaction.